Kelly Ayotte, Who Has Voted Multiple Times to “Defund” Planned Parenthood, Doubles Down on Trump’s Dangerous Policies on Women’s Health

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Washington, DC --- The morning after Ted Cruz dropped out of the 2016 presidential race, Senator Kelly Ayotte, who has voted to block patients from care at Planned Parenthood health centers, affirmed her support for Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

“It’s no surprise that Kelly Ayotte is getting on board the Donald Trump train. Kelly Ayotte has jumped at every opportunity to ban abortion and slash women’s access to care at Planned Parenthood. She has voted to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood every chance she’s had, and is holding up a Supreme Court nomination in an ideological crusade to make abortion illegal.

“Donald Trump and his party support policies that punish women and doctors for accessing or providing safe, legal abortion –– a constitutional right in this country. Donald Trump is a candidate that insults women and would rather shut down the government than allow women to access care at Planned Parenthood. New Hampshire women don’t want to leave their daughters with less rights than they had. We need a women’s health champion —not someone who adopts the GOP platform no matter how dangerous it gets.”

Kelly Ayotte is one of the key Senators preemptively calling to block the president’s Supreme Court nominee before ever holding a hearing. While she has met with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Kelly Ayotte is still refusing to do her job and give the president’s nominee a fair hearing with an up-or-down vote. The American people deserve a full court and a justice appointed by the president they elected for four years — not three—and Kelly Ayotte’s extreme positionabdicating her constitutional duty in order to obstruct the creation of a fully functional branch of our government is unconscionable.

Kelly Ayotte has voted four times to “defund” Planned Parenthood and voted against two separate amendments which would have restored funding for Planned Parenthood back into the underlying bill. She has even voted against equal pay legislation. This Senator has spent years calling for an end to safe, legal abortion and for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and even went so far as to circulate a letter urging support for a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks that included extreme provisions for rape survivors. Furthermore, Kelly Ayotte won’t protect access to birth control coverage, and proposed a plan that would make more women pay for birth control by undermining the health law that gave nearly 300,000 New Hampshire women access to no-copay birth control.

A survey conducted in 2015 by Hart Research shows that voters in the battleground state of New Hampshire strongly support Planned Parenthood, and oppose Ayotte’s position to “defund” the organization --- blocking patients who rely on federal funding from accessing preventive health services, including the cancer screenings and family planning services like birth control that Planned Parenthood provides to millions of women in communities across the country.

75 percent of voter polled in New Hampshire, including majorities of Republican voters, have an unfavorable reaction to the idea of shutting down the federal government to block any funding for Planned Parenthood.

By a two to one margin, voters in battleground states including New Hampshire are less likely to vote to re-elect their senators if they vote to block patients from accessing care at Planned Parenthood.

Fourteen separate national polls conducted since last June show strong support for Planned Parenthood and extraordinarily strong opposition to blocking patients from care.